Statement

My project entitled External Consciousness was started in Micol Hebron's class Art and Spirituality, where I decided to map the spiritual understanding of my own subconscious over an extended period of time. The idea was to conceptualize an inconceivable aspect of my own psyche that would start from an introspective and personal place and extend outwardly by relating to a universal understanding of the human spirit. There’s a profound power in the way that subtle daily efforts can create monumental change. The result of this project is a body of work that is in dialogue between inconceivable chaos and visual representation.

The purpose of the work is to understand the power of the subconscious in daily increments over a large period of time—a period that initially was created by enforced confinement due to the pandemic—so as to further my understanding of innate human spirit over time. Each painting measures 10x10 inches and engages with color theory and gestural movement to translate the interpretation of what I was feeling over a single day. In an era of social media that has broken our sense of time and space, with the recycling of information and data to an endless degree, the accumulative quality of this work contributes to defining a historical period that has lost its sense of time. I started this project in my studio apartment as a way to cope with what I was experiencing through confinement. In a physical sense, the environment I was in my room and studio and living area has all been conflated to the same space, which has inherently affected the way I conduct my practice. The paintings became a daily ritual that kept track and of how I was feeling and helped process my experience of living alone in a pandemic. When I look back at them now, it is clear that they reveal more than just the personal interpretation of my own psyche; they provide insight on human behavior as a whole. Additionally the paintings are visual signifiers of time passing, through the periodical methodization of moments. 

The effect of time cannot be defined, understood or conceived in one single moment. Time can only be conceptualized through the visual accumulation of moments.  This project facilitates the understanding of how we perceive and conceptualize the passage of time over periods of social chaos.